Soyo SY-6BA+III Motherboard Evaluation

Overview

Prior to about a year ago, Soyo was well known in Europe and Asia, but not in the United States. With the acquisition of M Technology last year, Soyo was able to penetrate the U.S. market very quickly, and have proven themselves to be one of the top motherboard manufacturers in the world in terms of quality.

As indicated by the name, this is the third iteration of this motherboard. With the i440BX chipset getting rather long in the tooth and Intel being forced to release faster processors at an almost dizzying rate, the need for updated motherboards to support these processors is a necessity. The SY-6BA+ III is intended to provide the additional features to take advantage of the most recent Intel processors, and is targeted towards the high-end desktop and games market. In order to appeal to the gaming users, it is necessary to include overclocking features and this motherboard has them to spare. Fortunately, along with these features Soyo has maintained their high standards of quality and stability.

In addition to the motherboard, the components used in testing were Intel Pentium II 400 and Celeron 400 processors, Crucial Technology PC133 SDRAM, Western Digital 8.4GB UDMA/66 HDD, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI controller, Toshiba 4x SCSI CDROM, Quantum 512MB SCSI HDD and Matrox Millenium 8MB video card. We ran a number of diagnostics and burn-in tests to put the board through its paces. We also tested several different FSB settings with a non-multiplier locked Pentium II 300.